E3 WiiWare – A Collection of Good Titles

BIT. TRIP. CORE. is one of the most beautiful pixilated games I have ever played, I am not just saying that because it was all flashy with colors and kept my attention, but it was actually somewhat challenging to play as well. The Multiplayer mode requires you to share pay attention and work as a team to clear levels. If you don’t split up the areas to protect then you won’t be able to beat the game and will end up black and white pong mode really fast. [Pond mode being when you are close to losing]

For a game that relies on the beat, it was hard to demo at Nintendo’s both since “D.J. Hero” was right next door. All I can really say is if you liked the first game, this one will surely fill the void if you beat it.

A very interesting article. I had only known about Cave Story and Final Fantasy IV After Years. You’ve got some good coverage of each of the five titles that has got me interested in Military Madness. Thanks, Will!

@JoshDad: I’m with you regarding music games – they just never seem to hit that sweet spot. But after I tried Bit.Trip BEAT (the predecessor for CORE) I realized that it’s not as much a music game as an old-school twitch-fest where the beat works as an audio cue. Not sure if that’s your thing… but it is a really solid WiiWare title if you like old-school stuff and ever enjoyed playing pong.

@Will: At the end of your article on Miltary Madness, you wondered why a RTS game wouldn’t use the pointer… if it was RTS I would agree, but the game is turn-based (think Advance Wars instead of StarCraft) so it doesn’t matter that much.

Anyone who liked the strategy in Advance Wars will eat Military Madness up – it’s more complicated, but much more strategic. If you aren’t sure, you can download the old TurboGrafx-16 version on the cheap as a test run.

You get it wrong, I just find it weird that you can’t instantly select something with the WiiMote with the pointer, instead of having to D-Pad through squares to get to something. It just seems to waste some time.